Toyota Motor Corp will extend the time it takes to develop its vehicles by an average of four weeks in a bid to ensure quality following a string of high-profile recalls, a top executive said.
"The fast growth of the past decade has been too much in some areas for the company to keep up with," Executive Vice President Takeshi Uchiyamada told a small group of U.S.-based reporters at Toyota headquarters on Wednesday.
Uchiyamada, in charge of research and development, said Toyota had assigned about 1,000 engineers to deal specifically with quality issues, out of the 14,000-strong R&D staff.
The quality of Toyota's cars -- once a benchmark for the industry -- has come under scrutiny after the world's top automaker recalled more than 10 million vehicles globally since late last year, mostly for problems of unintended acceleration.
Criticized by regulators for being too slow to act and out of touch with consumers' needs, Toyota has also set up a new team of 100 engineers independent of development to audit vehicle quality from the perspective of drivers, Uchiyamada said.
"It's important for our engineers to look at a vehicle and see how customers might use it in ways that haven't been reflected in our testing," he said, adding that doing so could help identify problems like the issue of stacked or loose floormats before they hit the market.
"We want them to be a little mean."
Toyota announced a number of steps earlier this year to reverse a quality slide and win back consumer confidence, including setting up a 50-member committee, chaired by President Akio Toyoda, aimed at giving more autonomy to regional operations to speed up decisions on quality issues.
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